One day I was walking past the college poster store and what did I spy with my little eye but a Klimt reproduction? It was right there, lodged between a poster of a glassy-eyed Victoria's Secret model and a chart of pornographically-named cocktail recipes (gotta love college towns). I knew this image from my studies. It was part of the Stoclet Frieze (Schlocklet Frieze, in my jargon?) which depicts the Tree of Life in fantastic curlicues; the tree is flanked by two figures-- to on the left, a woman, austere, vaguely Egyptian, regarding something out of level, critical eyes, and then, to the other side of the tree is the object of her lightly guarded gaze: a man and a woman embracing as if to fuse back together into some essential undivided state, as if to become an androgyne.
So that's the layout of the entire frieze, but the section that caught my eye in the poster store was just the first section, the watching woman. This section is called Erwartung. NO, not "EAR-WART-UNG," stop that. Say it with me: "EH-VAH-TOONG," luscious dark German vowels meaning "expectation." The final section of the frieze, with the couple, is called Erfüllung-- "fulfillment," or maybe, even more literally, "filling up" (giggity!) I cast about the store for this complementary tableau but it was nowhere to be found; it looked like I was stuck with Erwartung for now, with the expectant, narrow-eyed, perpetually unsatisfied chick. Still, it would have to do. I bought the poster, took it home, and jankily scotch-taped it to the closet door of my bedroom: BOOM, I had brought high culture into the shabby space, just like that. Expectation, yearning, searching, a reminder of... something yet to come. And I would find the Erfüllung tableau in good time, whenever it presented itself to me, maybe when I stumbled upon real-life fulfillment (whatever that happened to mean-- all I knew was that it had evaded me up to that point, that I was still waiting).
***
In the course of my waiting-for-life-to-percolate, to really get underway, I had to find ways to pass the time. One of my activities was to watch the first four seasons of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on Hulu. And in the first episode of the fourth season, I was totally called out on my Klimtian pretensions, unmasked for the cliche that I was. In this episode, Buffy and co. go off to college (the fictional University of California, Sunnydale) and it turns out that there is a vampiric subculture of upperclassmen at the school that likes to prey on new freshmen (yes, it's a metaphor-- for anything, really, goths, peer pressure, fraternity/ sorority hazing rituals, etcetera etcetera. I'm sure that somebody has written a dissertation on this episode alone. I once saw an edited volume of "Buffy Studies" for sale at a meeting of the American Schmoozicological Society, no joke). Anyway, these upperclassmen vampire-den-folk like to stealth-attack their victims in the dorms and then subsequently raid the spoils (easy mac? shower caddies? beanbag chairs?) and they also hedge bets on the wannabe-artsy posters that will invariably adorn the walls of the freshies. "Is it a Monet or a Klimt?" they wager in a little throwaway scene, because at UC Sunnydale it is apparently always one or the other.
Ohhh, the embarrassment that I felt. Joss Whedon and company had preemptively mocked me in the late 90s, long before I had even heard of Klimt, and then years later I had grown up and Seen The World and returned to my college town brimming with cultural messianism-- I had come back to tell you all!-- or so I thought, but really I was just playing out a stereotype, I was no different from the nameless, faceless hordes of fictional freshmen at a fictional Southern California university. I deserved to be descended upon by proto-hipsterian vampires and put out of my misery!
When I had finally figured out my escape route from Schroomington, when I at long last had amassed the means to get out of dodge, I peeled Erwartung down from the closet door and rolled her up and put her in a pile of cast-off possessions along with my cheap Target comforter, my plastic pencil canister, all of the collegiate trappings that I was determined to transcend en route to a new identity. Erwartung was going to Goodwill, where she would doubtless catch the eye of some fresh sensitive head-up-his/her-bum eighteen-year-old individual and find a loving home; I, on the other hand, had become a person of refinement, was destined for bigger things, was going to make a splash in the City of Dreams, was off to seek Erfüllung there.
***
This last January, I was in the metropolis of Schlock Sangellis-- probably not too far away from a real-life prototype for UC Sunnydale, come to think of it-- and I was catching up with an old chum, Raphael. And I do mean "old chum"; we go wayyyy back, prepubescent, prehistoric, to childhood piano lessons and goofy community choirs. Back in those days Raphael was a complete oddity: frail, skinny, home-schooled, hyper-bright and shrewd even then, yet so circumscribed by his cultish family upbringing that he lacked some basic human knowledge. (I introduced him to the phenomenon of rap music. Me! Yes!) We went to summer music camps together, caught frogs at dusk, herded our peers together and attempted to sing through fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier. We were SO COOL, you guys. Anyway, the two of us had grown up, gone through this and that, and drastic transformations had been wrought-- he lost his religion, became a gym rat, tanned like crazy, moved to Schlock Sangellis to seek fame and fortune as a film composer, and I became... whoever I am today. And now we were sitting across from one another at a Mexican restaurant in Beverly Sills, having taken a jaunt through the bling-y neighborhood in his convertible with the top down (SO COOL, look at us now, running feverishly away from the misfit past that nipped always at our heels) and we munched a stack of fresh tortillas and updated one another on recent doings and undoings.
Both of us were emerging from rough spells, it seemed, though he had been working on himself for quite some time whereas I was just starting to rethink my coping strategies, i.e. realizing that I had none and should probably fix that. Raphael had an advantage over me, having actually endured palpable hardship and dysfunction in his life. "Let me tell you what I've been doing these days," he said. "Alana, it's great. I've never been so disciplined. I wake up at 6 AM every morning to meditate, and then I read through all these different religious and philosophical texts and contemplate them, and I've pretty much let go of all my anger, my anger towards my parents, towards my crazy exes, my coworkers, I've just forgiven everyone." I tore a tortilla into strips and said, "Wow, that sounds kind of awesome, actually. I want some of your Kool-Aid."
"No, it's amazing. I mean, I'm not perfect. I have to keep at it constantly, I'm always about to slip back into destructive patterns, but once I get to that place of non-attachment, the most amazing things happen. You wouldn't believe it, Alana: the most beautiful women you've ever seen, the most beautiful women in all of Schlock Sangellis! -- they just appear before me. And then they take their clothes off! And then they disappear once they've served their purpose, and I do whatever else I need to be doing! It's great!"
"RAPHAEL!" I exclaimed, punching his arm, "do you mean to say that your virtuous eightfold path or whatever is really just a giant ploy to get LAID? With no strings attached? You're something ELSE. You're making Siddhartha roll over in his grave... wait, was Siddhartha even buried or did he just dissolve into the atmosphere or something? Hahaha... oh, it doesn't even matter... haHAha, Raphael, you conniving douchebag, you rapscallion..." I was entertained rather than offended because I still held this image in my mind of Raphael as a borderline-emaciated little white boy who had legitimately feared the dawning of Y2K and was convinced that his roommate at music camp was a gangster on account of a pierced ear. The newly-assumed "playa" identity didn't quite ring true.
"No, I'm telling you, Alana, attachment and expectation, that's where we go wrong. Think of it like you think about food. You're hungry right before you eat, right?" "Well yeah, I'm jonesing for my chile relleno that I ordered... where is it, by the way? "But see, after you've eaten the chile relleno, you're not going to keep obsessing over food, right? You're just going to go about your life until you're hungry again, and then you'll eat." I cocked my head. "That's the plan, at least," I said. "So-- the hot Schlollywood babes, the ones that magically appear before you, they're the proverbial foodstuff?" He grinned. "Well, sure. But I don't overdo it, just like I don't overeat. And yeah, I work out a lot."
***
It took me a little while to furnish my room when I first moved to Schmanhattan. I wanted to do it right, mark the new chapter-- the nascent adulthood, the ensuing fabulousness-- with swanky material acquisitions. No more taped-up posters, no more Target plywood bookshelves or floor-lamps pillaged from the dumpster at Snackwell Parish. Unfortunately, I was also flat broke, so my lavish interior decorating plans took some time to mobilize (and eventually they just devolved into several disorienting Ikea binges in a dystopian warehouse in blighted industrial North Blurzy) but I swore that I would be painstaking in my art selection-- I would raid flea markets in remotest Crooklyn for one-of-a-kind finds, I would never again be the butt of a Joss Whedon joke because my wall adornments were too mainstream!
Then, one evening, I was taking out the trash; I went down to the basement, and what did I spy with my little eye but a reproduction of Klimt's "The Kiss" leaning against one of the recycle bins? It wasn't a poster but an actual painted canvas in a bronzed frame; I knelt down to run my hand over the stucco texture of the image's surface. Aww, how sweet, I thought condescendingly, some college student is growing up and rising above her schlock-art phase, just like I did once! But as I studied the painting, I noticed that it looked like a rotated version of Erfüllung, the "fulfillment" tableau-- this could have been the same couple, only viewed from a different angle, their faces now visible (he's darker than she, gives the impression of having swooped in and taken her by surprise but she just succumbs, sinks into inevitably there in the golden garden). And I felt stupidly affected by the painting-- I had a sudden urge to jet out to the bodega and buy a single fresh fig... but wait, they're not so well-stocked, okay, an orange, then, and I wanted to sink my nails into the peel and breathe in the floral-heavy-bitter scent of the oils... or I wanted to run upstairs to my apartment and dig out the mouldering old copy of the "Song of Songs" that I had stolen from my parents and whisper the tremulous poetry into some imaginary ear.
Aha, I thought, cliches like Klimt are cliches for a reason, because the original things are so good and true that they have been perpetuated ad nauseam. And then I thought, well, shit, I would be a bad person if I didn't adopt this orphan-Klimt. It's not Erfüllung, but it's close-- this must be a sign-- and besides, my walls are awfully bare, and maybe it would serve me well to have swoony Fulfillment watching over the proceedings of my life, and also, since when did I ever turn down anything that had been proffered to me for free?
***
Raphael and I had moved onto some post-meal espresso-- marvel at our sophistication now, remember when we slurped red-white-and-blue popsicles in the summer?-- and we were still riffing on themes of Zen and expectation and attachment and so forth (we were in the South of California, after all; it's a requirement). "You know, you're right, buddy," I said, "expectation just leads to attachment, and then 'attachment to suffering leads', like Yoda said in Revenge of the Sith."
And then, because I'm supposedly a schmoozicologist, and should have a better set of cultural references on hand than George Lucas' desecration of the Star Wars franchise, I started telling Raphael about Guillaume de Machaut from the fourteenth century-- how I learned, last semester, that he was as much of a poet as a composer, and how he wrote this epically involved narrative/ autobiographical mashup called the Voir Dit, the "True Story, " the "Real Real" (I had interrupted class to say that it was like one of those MTV "exclusive" artist documentaries where they're like, "You think you know? You have no idea. This is the diary of Britney Spears." See, I am nothing if not a constructive member of graduate seminars). So anyway, in the "Voir Dit," Machaut recounts how this random fangirl, Toute-Belle (which translates to "totally hot"), writes to him in praise of his poetic and musical gifts and basically states that she has fallen in love with him from afar, although they've never met. Thus begins a fraught epistolary courtship wherein they send each other poetry, love letters, musical compositions, and it's all so over-the-top: he's like, "Just as I could never count all the stars in the universe, so I could never quantify just how much I want to meet you IRL," and she's like, "I'm dying of longing, you're soooo talented, I played the mix-tape you sent me-- er, I sang through the virelai that you composed, tra-la-la," and they both just can't wait to put their hands on each other and to consummate the damn thing. But then they finally do meet, and... ehhhh. Things fizzle. They maybe have sex one time-- Machaut is vague and euphemistic, Venus comes down to visit them-- and then Toute-Belle starts playing hard-to-get, and then she's seen around town wearing a green dress, and in the Middle Ages green was totally the color of loose women! so she's two-timing him, or worse, and then the book turns into a rambling, slightly bitter meditation on the vicissitudes of fortune.
"See, Raphael, what happened is that Machaut and Toute-Belle set up these crazy expectations about each other, and it just screwed them over big-time! Bit them in the ASS! And stuff like that still happens... I mean, my last boyfriend and I talked so much before we even met-- he was a friend-of-a-friend-- and we said all this ridiculous stuff to each other, like 'I've never known a beautiful soul like you,' or, 'you make me feel like major-major seventh chords,' and I was like 'oh VOM, this is too much,' and yet part of me so wanted to believe that it was real and genuine, our connection, and that somebody could care about me that much, so I went with it. And then we met and just supremely disappointed each other, because nobody could ever live up to what we had imagined, projected... I was just like, 'your hand feels wrong, you are crushing my fingers, bebb, ease up,' and he was like, 'you're so obsessed with trivial things, like, why did you just spend five minutes showing me how to water the mint plant in your apartment?' and I was like, 'your lack of interest in the mint plant is indicative of your lack of interest in the natural, sensual world and also of your inability to nurture,' and he was like 'you just never turn off your manic interest in everything, I can't ever relax around you' and so on, and we just tore each other apart all the time over things like a MINT PLANT. It was really bad! We probably damaged one another's psyches forever in the space of those few months. Fucking expectations! What a fail, man; what an epic, epic fail."
Raphael nodded in a been-there kind of way. "No, Alana, actually, this is so, so great. See, we need to have those experiences, we need to build something up so much that it can only come crashing down horribly, we need to get burned by these unstable people exactly because they expose all of our own instabilities, our weaknesses, and then we learn how to find our centers again, to let go of our expectations of others and accept limitations and eventually accept ourselves."
I raised my espresso demitasse in a toast. "Fine words, my bro, my Sensei," I said. "Easier said than done. But yeah, that's my long-term goal. So, hear, hear: in this, the Year of our Lord 2013, I do declare that I shall make a concerted effort to jettison expectation, to accept the limitations of my fellow man and to forgive their trespasses against me, and to practice more piano and to try meditation and yoga and to stop snarfing Thai-flavored potato chips and scrolling through Missed Connections on Craigslist when the going gets tough. But I shall also accept that I will fail a lot at these things, especially at first." "Yeah, you will," he said, "and it's completely okay. It's part of the process, and it's really good that you know that already." We clinked our coffee-cups together. "Look at us, Alana, we're doing so great," he said, and I saw the old innocence shining through the assumed hyper-masculine exterior, this goofy Guidonic shell of Raphael. We paid up, exited the restaurant, and jumped into Raphael's convertible; he put the top down and cranked up some Kanye West and revved up the engine and we sped away through the hazy hills of Schlock Sangellis, cackling maniacally.
***
So, once you give up Expectation, then Fulfillment strikes. Of course it does. Such is the way of the universe, the first law of human thermodynamics, the Tao of "stop chasing, stop trying, just sit perfectly still and let the butterfly come rest on your shoulder." So there you are, sitting still, ready to turn in for the night, mumbling things to yourself like "que sera, sera," or "so it goes," or "chopping wood, drawing water," and then BAM, in swoops Erfüllung and you're like, oh! really? now?! wait, what?... oh, okay. Okay. Okay! Let's go, then! But the tricky thing is this. Fulfillment comes-- mostly, almost always-- on the heels of non-expectation: it is unpredictable, un-summon-able, and then just as quick to depart. And when it does, it knocks you right back into the Realm of Expectation even though you swore that you wouldn't be hanging out on that side of the tracks anymore. So while your philosophy might have been "Just keep swimming," you are flush with your recent success and are tempted to go deep-sea diving for more of the various mollusks that are rumored to live down there, you want to snatch up as many as you can, extort them greedily for pearls or other pleasures, but the more you pry, the more they will clam up (ha!), and oh look, you're über-underwater now and at substantial risk of drowning or being crushed by the pressure, and anyway didn't you know that the only way to really coax a mollusk open is to steam it gently in white wine, whereupon it will yield its dead flesh to you, plump and delicious?
(Wow, that metaphor really ran off the rails, even by my standards).
Most nights, lately, I try very consciously to undo Expectation, to loosen the nefarious bonds of attachment; I repeat phrases to myself, read a few lines of this or that, make some herbal tea, close my computer and abandon the internet with its insatiable maw of wants and desire and one-upmanship and photoshopped happiness and incendiary comments sections and so forth. How virtuous of me. And then I go to sleep and my subconscious immediately rebels against every inch of the virtue, and I'm having some fever dream where I'm frying up bacon to dump into my vegan soup, and then my dead doggie comes trotting over to me (lured by porcine aromas?) and I rub the velvety spot on the crown of her head, and then suddenly I'm on the subway stabbing my mortal enemy with a golf pencil, and then you were there too (and you were there, and you were there...)
I wake up bleary, crusty-eyed, and Klimt is still on the wall, amber frame presiding over the room, man and woman doing what they always do. Screw you guys, I think, you and your swoopy embrace, the two of you always at the absolute zenith of the Expectation-Fulfillment cycle, preserved for eternity in that moment just after the waiting is over, just when the tension has ruptured, but then just before the inevitable fallout, the comedown, the waning. But I don't have time to stare, to indulge in another Byzantine reverie, because I overslept per usual and I need to go all the way out to Spleens and I'm running late and the subway has been so unreliable these days and I need to get dressed and splash some water on my face and now I don't even know if I'll have time to make coffee, shit shit SHIT...
